Ten Steps to Writing an Article
1. Realize that writing is a process, not a short burst of frantic activity. The usual steps are planning, research, writing a rough draft, editing, then writing a final draft.
2. Planning an article involves discussing why it is important and what you want to include. If you decide about length, scope and focus in advance, it will save you time and effort later.
3. Good articles are descriptive. Draw on your own experience and talk to those who have more experience or different experience than you.
4. The best articles help readers solve problems, save time, avoid mishaps and do their jobs more effectively. You can’t assume that the reader shares your perception of a problem; you may have to sell them the problem before you sell them a solution.
5. Write your draft the way you would tell the story to one of your friends. It should be informal and clear. Short words and short sentences are fine.
6. Readers want articles about things they can actually control and problems they can solve. Writing an article about a huge problem that is too large or too expensive merely raises the reader’s anxiety.
7. Tell real stories. Use actual examples. Readers want to hear about things that happened. They aren’t interested in platitudes, cliches, lectures, or slogans. Readers want reality, not theory.
8. Magazines are a clutchplate between the way things are and the way they should be. Ideally, everyone follows all the rules all the time, and no mishaps ever happen. In reality, people cut corners, take chances, stop paying attention, fall asleep in class, drive drunk, ignore their supervisor, take the easy way out, get in a hurry, resist learning, and on and on.
9. A magazine article doesn’t regurgitate official procedures or rules. Readers have plenty of those things already; the problem is that they don’t follow them. Simply repeating the procedures avoids the real problem.
10. "Why" is more interesting than "what." Defining a problem or a hazard is only the starting point.
